Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Ok, it's time for the April Blogging Contest. Sorry that this is coming out a little bit late. I've been slammed by a nasty cold, and a little behind on everything. Fortunately, I seem to be on the upswing after four days of sleeping 14-16 hours a day and hiding under a pile of quilts.

With Ruby 2.0 and all the alternative implementations in the air, I've been drawn to the idea of changes. This month's blogging contest theme is: "What Changes would make Ruby a better language without making it into something that isn't Ruby?"

Every serious programmer knows that his (or her) favorite programming language has warts. Here's you're opportunity to tell someone about it. All you need to do is post your thoughts on your own blog and link to them in the comments here. I'll accept entries until midnight (MDT) on April 30th. Then I'll work with my to co-judges to pick the winning entry.

As before, the writer of the winning entry will get three Apress books of his choice. So, what are you waiting for, it's time to win some books.

I dislike blogging but here's my piece in the comment. Ruby is unsuitable for GUI client development, and in a major way.

It doesn't come with any real GUI tookit and you have to install 3rd party library+bindings. The best canditate is naturally wxwidgets because it runs on virtually every platform and it manages to look and feel native in a few while at it.

Yeah, it's not that "hard" to install what is required but 3rd party stuff means more risks of breakage here. Stuff is tested less, you have to manage both the binary installation and the bindings, and the amount of proper integration testing is minimal. It's really not tempting quality wise to use stuff like 3rd party bubblegum/ducttape binding libraries.. They are just simply 2nd class citizens.. Which leads into Ruby sucking as an option for creating heavy GUI clients.

Ruby needs to come by default with some sane toolkit or it will never be used widely for such stuff.